3GP to WAV Converter

3GP to WAV Converter

3GP is the container 3G-era handsets recorded to, standardized by 3GPP on top of the ISO base media file format — the same family as MP4. Its audio track is almost always AMR speech or AAC, neither of which most audio editors open directly. This tool decodes that track and writes it out as WAV: uncompressed linear PCM in a RIFF wrapper, which every DAW, transcription tool, and sampler reads without a codec. What it cannot do is add fidelity — a narrowband voice memo stays narrowband, just in an editable, universally supported container.

What's Actually Inside a 3GP Audio Track

WAV Format at a Glance

How to Convert 3GP to WAV

1. Upload Your 3GP File: Drag and drop your .3gp or .3g2 clip onto the page, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. You can queue several at once and convert them with the same settings.
2. Set Audio Sample Rate: Leave it on ORIGINAL to keep the recording's native rate — 8000 Hz for AMR-NB, 16000 Hz for AMR-WB — or pick 44100 Hz or 48000 Hz if a downstream tool insists on a standard rate. Resampling changes the sample grid, not the fidelity.
3. Set Audio Channel and Trim: Leave Audio Channel on ORIGINAL, or force MONO; most 3GP voice recordings are already mono, so choosing STEREO just duplicates the channel and doubles the bytes. Use Trim to keep only a section of the clip.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and download your WAV. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

Choosing Sample Rate and Channels

Because WAV is uncompressed, its size is pure arithmetic: sample rate multiplied by bit depth multiplied by channel count. That makes the two settings above the only real levers on output size, and both are lossless-neutral in the direction that matters.

• Leave both on ORIGINAL when the WAV is going into an editor, a transcription service, or Audacity. This is the smallest correct output and skips a resample.
• Choose 44100 Hz when the file feeds a CD-mastering chain or a DAW project locked to 44.1 kHz, so the host does not resample on import with its own algorithm.
• Choose 48000 Hz when the audio is going back into a video timeline — 48 kHz is the standard rate for video production and for DVD-Video audio.
• Choose MONO for any speech recording. AMR is a mono speech codec to begin with, so a stereo WAV of it is two identical channels and exactly twice the size.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my 3GP voice recording still sound muffled as a WAV?

Because the source is almost certainly AMR-NB, the narrowband speech codec 3G phones used for calls and voice memos. AMR-NB samples at 8 kHz and carries roughly 200–3,400 Hz, which is the telephone speech band. Sibilants, high-pitched voices, and any music above that cutoff were discarded when the phone recorded. WAV stores the decoded samples exactly, so it preserves what is there but cannot reconstruct what was never captured.

How much bigger will the WAV be than the 3GP?

Considerably, and you can calculate it exactly. Uncompressed PCM runs at sample rate x bit depth x channels: CD-quality stereo (44,100 Hz, 16-bit, 2 channels) is 1,411.2 kbit/s, or about 10.1 MB per minute. A mono 8 kHz 16-bit WAV is 128 kbit/s, about 0.96 MB per minute. An AMR-NB source at 12.2 kbit/s is roughly a tenth of even that mono figure, so expect the WAV to be many times the original.

Should I upsample 8 kHz AMR audio to 44.1 kHz?

Only when a downstream tool requires a standard rate. Upsampling interpolates the existing samples onto a denser grid; it does not reveal detail the 8 kHz recording never had, and it multiplies the file size by more than five. If your editor accepts arbitrary sample rates, ORIGINAL keeps the file smaller and avoids an unnecessary resample.

Is the WAV a lossless copy of the 3GP audio?

Lossless relative to the decode, not relative to the original sound. The phone's AMR or AAC encoder permanently discarded data at capture time, and that loss is baked in. From the decoded PCM forward, WAV adds nothing further: our converter writes 16-bit little-endian PCM that stores those samples exactly, with no second lossy stage.

What bit depth does the WAV come out at?

16-bit linear PCM, little-endian, which is the default payload for WAV output here and the depth every editor and transcription tool accepts. That matches the audio-CD standard and is more than enough headroom for a source that was a low-bitrate speech or AAC stream. There is no benefit to a deeper output from an already-compressed phone recording.

Does the WAV keep the video, or any tags from the 3GP?

Neither. WAV is an audio-only container, so the video track is dropped entirely — the audio is decoded and re-written on its own, and nothing of the picture survives. WAV can technically carry an INFO chunk or ID3 tags, but the title, artist, and date fields a 3GP might hold are not reliably mapped across, and many players ignore WAV metadata anyway.

Why does my WAV cut off around 4 GB?

That is a hard limit of the format, not of the conversion. WAV stores the file size in a 32-bit unsigned integer inside the RIFF header, so a WAV cannot exceed 4 GiB — roughly 6.8 hours of 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo, or far longer for mono speech. For anything approaching that length, trim the clip into sections or use a compressed format instead.

Should I use WAV or MP3 for a phone voice memo?

WAV when you are going to edit, transcribe, or process the audio, because it avoids a second lossy generation. MP3 when you just need to store or send it — an AMR-NB voice memo is speech-band audio to begin with, so a modest MP3 bitrate loses almost nothing audible and the file stays small. Use 3GP to MP3 for that path, or compress the WAV afterward.

I have a bare .amr file, not a 3GP — what then?

Use the AMR to WAV converter instead. Many Android phones and voice-recorder apps save the AMR speech stream without the 3GP wrapper, and that tool takes the raw .amr directly. The output and the fidelity expectations are identical to the ones described here, since the underlying speech codec is the same.

How are my files handled?

Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public. The practical limit on a long recording is upload size and time rather than anything in the WAV format itself.